We are currently cruising our Islander Freeport 36 sailboat in Mexico. We have been extensively documentating our Islander Freeport outfitting for this adventure. We will now be reporting what of our outfitng is of value, what works and what is not of value.

BLU R1 HD Cell Phone 16GB - Black purchased from Amazon

Beginning of November 2016 - Tied up in Marina Mazatlán, Mexico Currently at our last house sit for 2016 here in San Marcos, Cal!

The reasoning behind purchasing a smartphone is to get away
from the Banda Ancha stick from TelCel in
Mexico. The Banda Ancha stick is not sold any more and is a pain to keep putting
time on. The web site is in Spanish and sometimes it changes and is hard to
navigate with our limited Spanish. Also, the WiFi does not always get a strong
signal. We use it for getting weather data and sending email etc.

We also use a phone, before a "Go Phone" from Mexico, to keep in contact with our daughter Lindsey who lives in San Diego along with other relatives in the USA.

So, to move forward and make our life a bit easier, we purchased the unlocked Amazon BLU R1 HD phone from Amazon using Debbie’s sisters “Amazon Prime” account.

This phone has dual sim cards so we can have one US and one Mexico sim card if we wish. Also we can expand the memory to 64 gigs if we so desire. It does everything we need it to do and lots more.

We got the $60.00 a month "International" Go Phone plan from AT&T so we can talk unlimited to our daughter in the US. This comes out to be the same as we were paying before for Banda Ancha and TelCelsim. Well, we needed to purchase the $60.00 version of the BLU R1 HD phone from Amazon. We can switch between our US and Mexican phone numbers which makes it easy for a person in Mexico, say a welder, to call us back on our Mexican number, which is free to call for the welder.

We can create a "Hot Spot" (WiFI network) with the phone and using Ultrasurf and PeerBlock free apps to keep us from being marked as being in Mexico so we can stream from Netflix or whatever to our TV with say "Google Chromecast". Just another option for entertainment.

We can also connect to the Hotspot (WiFi network) we create with our tablets and our laptop. With our laptop we can then download the weather data we need for our weather programs we use on the laptop. Also we can browse to web sites for weather data such as "Passage Weather".

Available through e-commerce giant Amazon, theBlu R1 HD costs $100 (8GB/1GB of RAM) and $110 dollars (16GB/2GB of RAM). But if you're an Amazon Prime Member and don't mind ads on the phone's display, those prices drop to $50 and $60.

There are lots more reviews on YouTube this is just one we grabbed.

We purchased a rubber case for the phone so just in-case?

I am not much for carrying around a phone so Debbie does the honors. Of course, our daughter and grandson are on the lock screen :)